The prize honors the inventions of optical tweezers and chirped pulse amplification

Three scientists who invented innovative ways to manipulate light have won the Nobel Prize in physics. The 9-million-Swedish-kronor award (about $1 million) will be doled out to Arthur Ashkin of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Gérard Mourou of École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, and Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada, the Nobel Prize committee announced October 2.

Ashkin, who will receive half of the prize, invented optical tweezers, a tool that can grab particles, viruses and even living cells with beams of light and move them around. The tweezers were first used to trap living bacteria without harming them in 1987. The tools are now used in laboratories worldwide to investigate the inner lives of cells and DNA.

The other half of the prize will be split between Mourou and Strickland, who invented a way to compress light into unprecedentedly short and intense pulses. Their technique, called chirped pulse amplification, takes a short laser pulse, stretches it, amplifies it and squeezes it again to create ultrafast beams of light.

Strickland, who was a Ph.D. student at the time, is the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in physics. “I am honored to be one of those women,” she said during the news conference announcing the prize. “We need to celebrate women physicists because we’re out there.”